Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism and the Making of Chinese Canadians by Timothy J. Stanley (review)

Taking up the theme of the year-long students’ strike in Victoria, BC from 1922 to 1923, Timothy Stanley offers the reader an authoritative account of the patterns of racism and anti-racism in coastal areas of British Columbia. Guided by political philosopher Harrah Arendt’s “texture of life,” Stanley provides analysis of the situation and the humanity of those who resisted exclusion. In the process, Stanley pens a complex theoretical framework to support his comment that “nothing about racism is inevitable or is a necessary outcome of human difference.” (7) Throughout the text, Stanley makes it clear that racisms and anti-racisms are highly variable. To remind the reader and reinforce the fact that racisms and racializations are fixed and constructed categories, he repeatedly identifies racialized terms such as “Chinese” and “White” with quotation marks, or “scare quotes.” Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians is the culmination of years of bilingual research, teaching, and reflection on the subject. Chinese primary materials are drawn from Victoria’s own Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association archives, the University of British Columbia’s Chinese Canadian Research Collection, and key articles in the Chinese Times. Stanley’s monograph joins other works that examine British Columbia Chinese Canadian history, society, and culture. It also joins several new projects financed by the Canadian Historical Recognition Program to acknowledge 62 years of institutionalized racism and to showcase the humanity and contributions of those affected, silenced, and excluded. Chapter 1 introduces the circumstances of the yearlong student strike in response to forced student segregation by the Victoria School Board. Justifications for segregation were many: the poor English fluency of Chinese students was detrimental to overall classroom learning; Chinese pupils were smelly, dirty, heathenous sexual deviants; and Chinese pupils posed a vaguely defined threat to the children of “white” dominant society. The remainder of the book is organized into two parts on racism and anti-racism. Chapters 2 through 5 are contained in the racism section. Chapter 2, “AntiChinese Racism and the Colonial Project of British Columbia,” presents the historical context of rapid Chinese migration to BC and questions why and how Chinese immigrants, disconnected from British commercial and cultural interests, were racialized in BC. It outlines the link between racialization and the creation of legislation in BC limiting Chinese voting, land ownership, educational, professional licensing, and citizenship rights. The third chapter explores the race thinking that informed “white” dominant society’s imagined, fixed and bound impressions of Chinese individuals, society, culture, and politics. Chapters 4 and 5 establish that fixed impressions further informed attitudes toward education. They also demonstrate organized racist state formation in key British Columbia Chinatowns where Chinese men and women found themselves excluded and segregated in most areas of everyday life. Chapters 6 through 9 form the second part of the book, which focuses on the anti-racism that shaped Chinese Canadian identity and political involvement. These chapters touch on religious, missionary, and Christian community involvements; and nationalism. As Stanley notes, “Chinese nationalism was the glue that held together first-generation migrants and the locally born; people of